Casa Museo Cayetano Gómez Felipe

The house museum occupies an eighteenth century Canarian townhouse on Plaza de la Concepción, next to the bell tower of the Concepción church and on one of the best known corners of the old town of San Cristóbal de La Laguna. The urban layout of the city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the building keeps the traditional domestic plan of La Laguna: a plain façade facing the square, an entrance hall and an inner courtyard with wooden galleries, with the rooms opening onto it. Most of the historic centre is pedestrian, so it is reached on foot from anywhere in town.

Inside is the collection put together by Cayetano Gómez Felipe (1902-1978), who lived here with his family and gathered furniture, ceramics, textiles, instruments, documents and household objects from island life across several periods. The visit runs room by room, which means the pieces are seen in the same domestic setting they were made for, something few museums on the island can offer. The courtyard is worth a few minutes on its own, since that is where the architecture of the house reads most clearly. It fits neatly into a walk taking in the Concepción church, the cathedral and the old houses along Calle San Agustín.

The house was built in 1703 for the Irish merchant Bernard Walsh, and at number 13 on the square it now holds what is regarded as the largest collection of Canarian antiques of its kind: painting, sculpture, glass, furniture, textiles, dress, jewellery, crockery, ironwork, architectural fragments, photographs and documents. Gómez Felipe assembled all of it within the archipelago, and taken together it ends up telling the story of the Canaries as a staging post between continents.